Finally completing my March madness imaging run is my Leo Triplet shot. This one was rather a bonus I didn't really plan for this spring, but simply found myself outside one evening and looking for something to point to telescope to. The individual galaxies in the triplet are very small for my equipment as they are only around 200 pixels wide each, so I don't get much individual detail, but I like the overall result. I've tried using drizzle integration a couple times (including here), but it usually just makes the images worse unless it is something really tiny. I just don't think I ever have good enough seeing for it - 2.0 "/px is about my sampling limit most nights. I think M66 is my favorite of the group - it just looks the most interesting to me.....
Leo is fairly high in the sky here (~60deg maximum altitude), but it does face south toward the city center (Buffalo) light pollution. Thus, southern images tend to be a little noisier for me, but the combinations of MLT are endless and I finally found something I didn't think was too bad. One of my favorite Leo images that I saw uploaded this season was
this one, which was also from fairly light polluted skies. Mine's not nearly as nice, but it shows me what another 50 hours of integration time might do!
A trick I have found with the galaxy shots this spring is that I make a luminance-based mask to isolate the background, and then do a fairly-aggressive MLT process on Chrominance. This removes residual RGB noise from the DeBayer in the background and makes it gray-scale, which I think is much less noticeable and doesn't require as much rgb/luminance smoothing. If anybody has other interesting techniques of background noise control or thoughts, I'm interested in hearing about them.
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